Tim Bobrowski is the superintendent of the Owsley County School District in eastern Kentucky. With an average annual income per family of about $21,000, the district is one of the poorest in the nation. His hometown, the county seat of Booneville, has fewer than 100 residents, with a town square, a couple of schools, some churches, a few dozen homes, and little else.
Jobs aren't exactly plentiful in the area, which was part of coal country before the mines closed. With coal gone and tobacco in less demand these days, Bobrowski and other community members are taking steps to prepare students for new types of jobs—especially work that can be done remotely through technology.
"We make other people their best employees," Bobrowski quips, referring to graduates who end up leaving the county to find lucrative work. The just under 700 students in his Appalachian district often have hard-earned grit that helps them to succeed elsewhere. Similarly, when students move away to pursue college or technical training, they may never return to live in Owsley County, he says.
New Strategies in Appalachia
What's happening in this Kentucky town mirrors the situation in many rural schools and communities across the nation. As these areas face drops in population and economic change, schools are looking for ways to keep graduates in the community and build the local economy.
Rural students and their futures are more important than many educators and policymakers realize: Nearly 8.9 million students attend rural schools—more than the enrollments of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and the nation's next 75 largest school districts combined, according to the newest Why Rural Matters 50-state report, released in June by the nonprofit Rural School and Community Trust (of which this author is board chair).
The rural brain drain is real in many communities, says John White, who served as the deputy assistant secretary for rural outreach at the U.S. Department of Education in the Obama administration. "But the piece that's missing is that the kids who stay need to receive a college education or technical training so that they're actually able to succeed in their local economy and make improvements locally."
In Owsley County, more than 100 people now work out of a small storefront next to the town's supermarket. That's the local site of Teleworks USA, a nonprofit organization that provides jobs at several locations in the region. Inside the Boone-ville location—and then sometimes at home after their training—people work as support or call center staff for companies such as Amazon, Nike, and PlayStation. The center has brought more new jobs to the community in the past year than all other businesses in the last decade combined, Bobrowski says.
The economic impact has been so great that the district is seeking ways to prepare more workers for open positions. Bobrowski and his high school principal are meeting with Teleworks USA to build apprenticeships that would allow high school students to work while learning and earning school credit, the superintendent says.
Some of Owsley's teachers traveled to Austin, Texas, this summer to learn computer programming—or coding—to bring back to all three schools for the 2017–18 school year. The elementary and high school libraries have also added makerspaces where students can work collaboratively on projects and tinker with toys and new technology. Bobrowski says that helping students learn those types of skills could revive the local economy. He contends that students won't have to leave the area, but if they do leave for college or technical school, they could return if there are opportunities to telework for remote companies or start their own businesses.
The idea is to start "rethinking the way we offer things for kids," he explains.
The Owsley County school leaders are also taking other steps to make the community livelier and provide new sources of income. The high school has opened a farmer's market, held under a large metal shed in a field behind the school building. Local farmers and residents can sell produce and other goods there two days a week for extra money. FFA students help run the market and grow crops in the adjacent field to be sold or shared with the school cafeteria.
For many rural school districts, the brain drain also applies to teachers. Rural educators often earn less than their counterparts in urban and suburban schools and have longer commutes because of housing shortages in many rural communities, Bobrowski says.
Owsley County has adopted microcredentials to help its educators grow their skills and earn higher pay. It now offers 27 online courses in subjects such as using technology, classroom pedagogy, and Google certification. Educators earn $150 for passing each course.
A Personalized Approach
The rural brain drain can manifest differently in different schools. For Jeff Dillon, superintendent (and elementary school principal) of the 500-student Wilder, Idaho, school district, about 45 miles from Boise, a high rate of student mobility has prompted a new approach to education—personalized learning.
About 30 percent of the Wilder district's students are new each year. "We're hoping we're going to slow that down some," Dillon says. Idaho has the 10th highest rural student mobility rate in the United States at 12.6 percent, according to Why Rural Matters.
"My push has really been to create a great system here for our students" that will prepare them "to live here and raise a family here," Dillon told an audience at The Atlantic's Education Summit, held in April in Washington, D.C. Students in Wilder are mostly Latino and come from low-income families, he said.
Dillon, who initially moved away to attend college in Washington State, was a minister before transitioning into teaching. He eventually returned to Wilder, where most local jobs are on farms, in agricultural plants, and in the dairy industry. The area is one of the nation's leading producers of hops, he notes.
With the shift to personalized learning, Dillon says, students have developed stronger "soft skills" (like critical thinking and communication) and have greater agency and responsibility for their own progress. Teachers are crafting more creative lessons and guiding students as they explore topics on their own or in groups, spending time each class using various online programs and conducting research. With the students having the freedom to pursue projects that interest them, the results have been even better than educators expected.
"We began to see that transformation [in] kids really above and beyond what we anticipated was going to happen," Dillon explains. His hope is that by developing in students the basic and soft skills that many employers want, his district's graduates will have opportunities to "work not at the end of a shovel, but in leading the particular companies and agriculture here in this area."
Grade levels are no longer as important in Wilder as they once were. Instead, students might be in "Studio A" or "B" for different subjects, signifying they're ahead in one subject or need extra work in another. Students who are behind can take the necessary time to catch up, while advanced students can move on to other work. In the past school year, elementary students’ achievement advanced by 1.5 years on average in math, Dillon reports.
Teachers in the district spend at least two hours weekly on professional learning, mostly to become mentors for students in their classes so that they can serve more as facilitators than lecturers. This approach allows students to engage in more personalized learning on their own and in small groups, and then show what they know using periodic exams, the superintendent says.
Internet access for local students is a major issue—more so because of low family incomes than availability, Dillon says (though inadequate connectivity is a major barrier to instructional innovation in many rural areas). The district uses a grant to provide 1:1 technology with built-in hotspots so that students can take their digital devices home.
So far, the personalized approach seems to be paying dividends. In 2016–17, the number of students who earned college credits in high school through dual enrollment rose by 55 percent, Dillon says. About 25 percent of middle and high school students attended summer classes voluntarily. Another sign of progress? Some families who recently moved outside the district are still coming to Wilder for school (which is allowed is Idaho).
Speaking at the summit in the nation's capital, Dillon was asked what he thinks many Americans don't understand about rural schools. "If we could put some time and effort into rural schools like we have in urban settings, I think our return on investment would be phenomenal," he said.
Growing a Professional Class
What it means to be a "rural" school can vary depending on location. Many rural districts are tiny: Half of rural districts in 23 states have enrollment of less than 485 students (the national median enrollment for rural districts), according to the Why Rural Matters report. But other rural schools are in small towns or cities, or in rural areas within a larger school district.
In Texas's Rio Grande Valley, one school district that serves several small cities near the Mexican border has created one of the nation's most extensive early-college programs, another method for building up and retaining local talent.
The successful Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District, composed almost entirely of Latino and low-income students, now stands alongside Texas's most affluent districts in college enrollment rates, says Daniel King, who became superintendent in 2007. But it's the system's newest innovation that is meeting more specific needs in the region.
Working with nearby South Texas College, the district is addressing the local shortage of nurses through a shared program that allows students to complete their nursing degrees while in high school. The need is so great for nurses that foreign nurses are routinely recruited to fill available jobs, King says.
The first cohort of 10 local graduates just finished in May—earning their associate degrees in nursing as they graduated from high school—and the first student from the program just passed an exam to become a registered nurse. The program shows "that this [brain drain] problem is solvable," says King. "By building and expanding these pathways, then we have an opportunity for our young people to [move toward] … upward mobility."
King's district is beginning to replicate the field-specific strategy in other health- and technology-related careers. The district is also partnering with South Texas College and the towns served by the district to build a training academy for public safety officers (police, fire and rescue, and border-related jobs), now under construction.
The results of the early-college model have been remarkable by any measure: Roughly 250 of the district's 2,000 graduates in spring 2017 finished high school with an associate degree, the superintendent says. A similar number earned career certificates from the community college. Most of his district's 33,000 students earn college credits in high school. About 3,500 take dual-enrollment courses each semester.
These efforts have the potential to transform "the Valley" into a more prosperous region where students can pursue career training and college—and more of them will stay to help their communities rise, King says.
"We see a growing professional class," he says, adding that it's gratifying "to see that kind of change in a region where those types of things were not happening before." Right there, close to home.
